Dead Man’s Diary [Review]

Dead Man’s Diary is a survival game developed by TML-Studios, who are new to making any sort of game like this. And I’d say it was a hell of a start for them. Dead Man’s Diary takes place years into an apocalyptic future where the main character is thrown out of the safety of what was described as a bunker or vault to save resources. The main character narrates the game through his diary, so he can get a bit wordy with it but it does mimic the style of someone reading their personal diary out loud. The narration is also voice-acted! Now, it isn’t the best voice acting and akin to the quality of what you would find in older games like House of the Dead or a PS1-era game, but the actor definitely has heart. You can easily understand him and he puts emotion into it when it’s needed. It was a welcome surprise for the game.

As for gameplay, this game is full of survival. You have many different meters to look after to keep yourself alive including; water. Food, health, temperature, and radiation. Radiation might be the most important one as if it gets dangerously low, you will be infected with a radiation illness that cannot be cured. Luckily there is plenty of food and water lying around in chests, granted most of it is irradiated but I still didn’t have trouble keeping myself fed during the beginning of the game. A lot of the game is walking around and looking for stuff. Stuff to eat to survive, but also stuff to build a shelter. Luckily there is a very nice feature in this game that shows you where you need to go next. A white icon will appear and it will lead you to the next item you need. This is very helpful because, in the first area, you need to walk around to find items to build a fire and a tent. This part of the game takes place at night and your flashlight does take batteries. So, it’s easy to be lost in the darkness. I think this feature could use a bit of work though. It seems to pick items at random instead of showing you items that are next to each other. If you were to pick up firewood in one area and miss the matches that were also there then you’ll have to walk back when the radar decides to show you the matches. But I can’t be too annoyed with it, I would have been lost early on without that feature.

This game is also separated by areas, once you reach the next area it’s a point of no return so make sure you get everything you need to in each area. This can be helped by the plethora of notes that are scattered around the map. The notes tell you secrets like “I hid an item behind the cliff to the right”, so make sure you visit every area the notes tell you about to find more supplies. When it comes to the story I was pretty intrigued. At the beginning of the game, there are hints of people or creatures that you need to look out for but for the most part, it seems to be pure survival against the irradiated earth itself. It’s a nice change of pace to play a survival game that isn’t just about zombies or one where you have to be running for your life and defending yourself against cannibals every two seconds.

Something that I would love to see this team work on is the plot scenes. There was a moment in the game where something was falling from the sky and there was a cutscene that showed the character running to safety. The way the cutscene is shown looks just like regular gameplay and is even in first person like the game, so I thought that I was supposed to take control for a second. I think it would have been cool to play this scene out yourself with a timer rather than just the last ten seconds where you run down a staircase into a shelter. Regardless of my personal thought though, I am insanely impressed with TML-Studios. You can tell just by playing the game that a lot of effort went into it. There’s quite a lot of attention to detail. There’s haptic feedback. The sound design is great, walking across a puddle warrants splashing footsteps. Sounds like that are often things games overlook and I was shocked to see that. Even though the voice acting itself is average, the effort that goes into it makes up for it.

I think both Dead Man’s Diary and TML-Studios have great potential. It is a pretty fun game coming from a developer who has only done simulation games in the past. You can play the game for yourself on PC and PlayStation 5. This game isn’t the greatest game to come out in this genre but it has a lot of heart and was very fun to play. This is a game and company to keep an eye on. I’d say this game deserves a 7/10 for the love and effort that feels like it went into this game.